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A Year in Recruitment

The first week or so back in the chair after the long Christmas and New Year break is often quiet, but as I sit here my diary has rapidly started to fill with client meetings. Hopefully a sign that 2012 will not be the economic disaster that the pundits would have us believe!

The speed at which the world of creative communications changes, made me think it would be good to reflect back on how Source as a business has changed over the year and to review other significant events that shaped the year.

PR, Advertising and Marketing

New creative was produced for us by the fabulous Wand – the concept being that we were looking to define pictorially and through copy, the experience that clients and candidates receive from Source and how our service breaks the stereotypes that are associated with other recruitment agencies in our space. Some of the ideas also tip a hat to our empathy for those people struggling in their current role. Wand used a play on words to show Source ‘rubbing out’ the perceptions associated with bad recruitment. We love it. Here is our favourite!Additionally, our friends over at Red Dog Communications have done a great job in getting us noticed across a mixture of national press, trade press and digital publications – thanks to you all!

Social Media in Recruitment

2011 has seen an explosion in Social Media. Clients now use it, to directly to source candidates. Candidates use it to promote themselves and many use it just to stay in touch with their friends, colleagues and peers.

Many sounded the death knell for recruitment agencies with the advent of ‘social recruiting’ – our view is that it is just another channel!

See our blog post for more on the subject. Basically, as Social recruiting grows so will the volume of unsolicited and poorly skilled applicants, as will the unwanted approaches from hirers to those with a Social Media profile. Recruitment agencies are here to stay!

For our part, we have spent 2011 training the Consultants here – and ourselves as a management team – to harness Social Media beyond LinkedIn. We have a formal strategy linked to our marketing objectives and our digital footprint puts us leagues ahead of our competitors in relation to our size and in terms of our ability to connect with talent. We are ‘Connected People, Connecting People’. So if you need help finding work or finding talent, please get in touch.

New Website

Back in June we launched our new website wearesource.co.uk after 12 months of painstaking work! We changed our domain name to (what seems like the obligatory) ‘weare’ and incorporated a host of features to demonstrate our connectedness, successes, client and candidate experiences, knowledge and ability. The site has received brilliant reviews and the design agency Studio Outputhas received several requests to build other recruitment sites. They have politely declined – saying that they couldn’t better the job they have done for us!

The Agency Workers Regulations (AWR)

The long drawn-out EU regulations finally landed in the UK. The regulations seek to protect the agency workers, by ensuring that they have the same rights and access to the remuneration packages and benefits offered to their permanent counterparts. The legislation is complicated, as clear as mud and – from the point of view of the creative communications industry – creates more problems than it solves. It remains to be seen what impact it has on the labour force of our industry and on the cost for clients recruiting staff. More on this http://www.wearesource.co.uk/blog/tagged/89

“It’s all about the charity work, mate”

Our 2011 nominated charity was the The James Baldwin Trust. We are hugely privileged to be able to support this brilliant cause, which helps those with T-Cell Non Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. The money raised ensures that the benefactors are able to be treated as outpatients rather than inpatients. The ability to stay out of hospital and only visit for treatment offers patients a far more comfortable experience, allowing them to be closer to family and friends more of the time. We have raised around £1500 so far and will continue our fundraising throughout 2012. One of our favourite fundraisers was the Santa Run in Greenwich Park.Jonathan Lindon (me), Sarah Dean (with hangover) and Angela Owusu-Banno dressed up as Santa’s and ran the 5km course. Sarah came last!

Making the most of our time off together

We at Source like to indulge in a spot of fun and frolics occasionally and this summer we descended upon REWIND FESTIVAL for a weekend of bad 80s outfits and equally bad dancing – to some of the best 80’s tunes! Check out our Facebook photos of the event! Rewind Festival 2011

As summer is the time for parties we also took a little boat ride along the Regent Canal in a barge, disturbing the gentile residents of Camden with our X Factor-style karaoke auditions on board. We were truly terrible! Check it out Source Barge Party 2011

And the winner is…

To round up a great year, we were hugely pleased to be nominated for ‘Best Large Agency’ in the Marketing and Advertising Recruitment Awards (MARAS). Not only were we nominated – we also won!!!

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